Lovers
of TV drama will remember him as the avuncular sergeant, Stanislaus
Jablonski, who greeted the rank-and-file cops at the start of each shift
in the final seasons of "Hill Street Blues." Movie fans might recall his
dependably sturdy supporting turns in a range of films, from "Broadcast
News" to "Mrs. Doubtfire." Broadway playgoers will reflect on the
formidable impression he made as a Soviet arms negotiator in "A Walk in
the Woods," or the wake of despair he left as a has-been real estate agent
in "Glengarry Glen Ross." Both earned him Tony nominations.

But it was Washington
audiences that forged the most enduring and intimate of kinships with
Prosky, who died Monday, five days short of his 78th birthday. As a
longtime company member at Arena Stage, he had an astonishingly tenacious
bond with theater in these parts. Joining Zelda Fichandler's resident
troupe in 1958, he appeared over the years in 126 productions, including a
performance as Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" once upon a time that
people who've been around the theater here still talk about.

Actors aren't monuments.
But those who make their homes in a particular city, who show up for work
in play after play, year after year, have a claim on some sort of landmark
status. A theatergoing habit has much to do with an exploration of the
new. It also, however, involves a cultivation of what one appreciates in
familiar things -- a special seat in a given playhouse; a composer whose
tunes you can listen to over and over and over; an actor who fills you
with a sense of reassurance, even while playing the heavy.

Prosky had that comforting
aura. Yesterday, as word circulated of his death -- it was just a few
weeks ago that he appeared at Theater J for a tribute-type evening of
reminiscences -- Washington theater people seemed especially stricken, in
the way a family can be startled and upended at the loss of a patriarch.

With that centered air and
doughy, workingman's mug, he did seem like a relative who could be sitting
at your Thanksgiving table, someone worthy of your trust. Filling the void
on "Hill Street Blues" in the mid-1980s created by the death of a beloved
original cast member -- Michael Conrad, who played the roll-call sergeant
from the show's inception -- could not have been easy. But Prosky, in
typical no-nonsense fashion, eased the transition and slipped in
seamlessly to the ensemble. So naturally, in fact, that the backstory
created for Prosky's character had him working in another precinct for
years before he actually showed up in the series.

He wasn't a chameleon,
exactly, but still, he brought finely calibrated permutations of himself
to every performance -- a blend of technique and that genetic inheritance,
presence. In his final Broadway play, the 2004 American premiere of
"Democracy," Michael Frayn's inspiring account of the rise of West German
leader Willy Brandt, Prosky played a political party leader, the scheming
Herbert Wehner. It was a measure of Prosky's skill that Wehner seemed a
cog of wily complexity in the play's fascinating political machinery.

I should disclose that
Prosky did not have much use for me. In a scathing letter to The Post in
2003, after I'd panned an Arena play in which he appeared, he wrote, in
essence, that I was a blight on the theater. I didn't read it closely for
the longest time -- it stung too much to have this respected eminence, for
whom I had not an iota of animus, so angrily disparage me.

But you have to grow a
thick skin doing what I do, even as a fine actor must keep his skin
transparent, sensitive to stimuli and reactive to intimations of injustice
and abuse. I will chalk his anger up not only to the friction that can be
engendered between those who act and those who express an opinion about
it, but also to the unadulterated passion he brought to the job.

And of
course, it was more than a job. Somehow, Prosky's success as an actor
needs to remain vital in the bloodstream of acting in these parts. It's
nice that people who energetically support the arts and have boatloads of
money get their names on the buildings that present the city's plays.
Wouldn't it be cool, though, if the men and women who make less
quantifiable but still bankable contributions got etched into the walls,
too? No one in this town would dispute that the name Robert Prosky will
forever have a capital ring to it.